


Cold Cuts

by gutrots



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood and Gore, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dehumanization, Gen, Gore, HYDRA Trash Party, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Intraoperative awareness, M/M, MCU trash meme, Medical Procedures, Medical Trauma, Multi, Surgery, Violence, non consensual medical procedures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-24 02:20:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15620358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gutrots/pseuds/gutrots
Summary: A journey of self-discovery through a lack of anaesthetic.





	Cold Cuts

The Asset is not a person.

It does not have a name. No date of birth, no age.

It does not have a mother or a father. It does not know where it came from. What made it. Maybe Mother Russia herself spat it out, sharp and mean and fully grown, straight into the harsh Siberian landscape it calls home. Her icy hands shaping and moulding, improving, making it sharper and meaner every time it returns to her frozen womb in its long days of sleep.

Like the Asset is becoming winter itself, bruised and bruising, unforgivable. Wind howling between temples and shards of ice scraping against skin from beneath the surface, impenetrable darkness of polar night settling over empty homes and shallow graves. Unfeeling. Inhuman.

The Asset does not know what it is made of.

The titanium and electrical current and red, _so much red_ , are the only certainty. A bright red star and the glint of liquid red reflecting on chrome, dried flecks of red caught in between metal plating. The rest, however, remains a mystery, and the Asset was not made to ask questions.

But in the late hours of the night, forgotten amongst the commotion of the military base, it lets it mind stray. Metal fingers scrape against a flesh palm, tracing blue lines and sharp points, trying to solve the mystery of what lurks underneath.

Mostly, it feels like ice and darkness caught in the coils of razor wire. Stench of gasoline and an echo of screams reverberating off concrete on steel on barren soil. Thick, black tar and flares burning red in the night. Order and punishment and pain, so much pain, inflicted and received. The ghosts of a hundred renegade corpses, sleeping beneath frozen ground, bleached bone scraping against rotting coffin wood. Electricity bringing it all to life, burning vivid blue underneath the skin.

Once, when dispatched on an assignment deep in the tundra, the Asset spots a lone, bone-thin wolf, emerging unhurriedly from between the pines. The security convoy transporting the Asset’s target should not be arriving for another two hours thirteen minutes and forty-one seconds, and so it lets its eye wander, tracking the starving animal across the hostile landscape.

The wolf’s fur is matted and it has a slight limp in one of its hind legs, but a promise of something vicious shines bright in its one good eye, the other one white like spilled milk. It walks unhurried, stalking down the snowed-over path, nose close to the ground and ears pointed. It makes no sound as it lifts its muzzle into the air, exposing yellowed teeth as it catches the scent of its prey.

Soundlessly, it disappears into the blurring shadows of the late afternoon.

The Asset, being the only one of its kind, naturally lacks anything to compare itself to. But in that moment, it reckons it might have found the answers to the unwelcome questions prodding at its brain like stabs of electricity at the least opportune of moments.

It feels like its insides are simply made of beasts like the one it has just observed, restless and tireless, ever pushing forward through snow and sleet, driven by some unfathomable hunger, a longing. Claws and eyes and fur, the ache in its stomach simply rows and rows of teeth, biting and tearing and clamping shut. The twitching in its fingers made up of frostbitten paws, urging to sink their talons into prey, to pull triggers and sharpen knives. A grotesque tapestry of hair, sinew and a hunt, stitched together and concealed beneath scavenged skin.

And scars, so many scars, holding it together like stitches.

Its insides hurt because _hurt_ is what they are made of.

The ceaseless thrumming in the back of its brain is just wolves clawing at each other, struggling to get out.

 

* * *

 

If the Asset was a person, it would perhaps understand the irony of wishful thinking. However, it is not one, so it does not preoccupy itself with such fickle concepts.

The only problem on its mind is an overwhelming fear. Its vision is compromised, blinded by a light like a thousand fluorescent light bulbs in a thousand damp prison cells in a thousand underground bunkers. Strapped by the arms and legs, it thrashes and bucks, struggling to get up, just a spooked animal in the headlights of a car, soon to be naught but a smear of red on black asphalt.

Trickles of red smear over its exposed stomach, stabs of pain punctuating every rasping breath. In its frenzy it almost does not notice the incision.

The cut is clean and sharp, parting the skin without any resistance. Precise. The hands that follow are less so.

There is pain and nothing but pain, the rows of sharp teeth right above the Asset's pelvis trying to resist the intrusion. Feral things growling at the gloved hands invading upon their darkness, dispersing it with a brightness like a nuclear explosion. Rivers overflowing, poison spilling out, bullets fired in self-defence.

Hands grab and prod and hurt, searching inside the Asset's body, trying to excavate the secrets of its very existence.

The Asset lifts its head, as high as the restraints will allow, and what it observes makes it nauseous.

Its torso is split down the middle, revealing a mess of tissue and blood, sinew, gristle and muscle, and guts. Slippery, bloated guts, rising and falling, slithering like fat worms inside a rotting corpse. Red and brown and purple, lined with a myriad of blue lines, caught in webs of white membranes struggling to keep them in place. Bulging, pushing against each other, squeezed too tight in the cavity of the Asset's body like rancid meat in a plastic bag.

Hands in blue gloves navigate the damp landscape of the Asset’s insides, trying to pull out pieces of shrapnel that have lodged themselves deep between internal organs. They push and pull at the distended pieces of meat, every shove a scream of pain through the Asset's veins. Fingers dig, loose tissue squelching around them, making such obscene sounds.

(That's when the Asset recognises that the pain it feels when Officer Glukhov requests its presence in the half-darkness of his private office is just things being shoved too deep into its guts. The realisation hurts more than the ordeal itself.)

There is a metal rack next to the operating table, and the intestines soon wriggle and worm their way onto it, nothing but fat vermin glistening underneath the too bright lights like they're trying to squirm their way back into the familiar darkness. Slabs of swollen meat are lifted to allow better access, spewing red onto the white folds of the Asset’s skin and it _hurts_.

It hurts when ligaments strain, when translucent strands of tissue desperately try to resist intrusion. It hurts when fingers pry, violate. It hurts worse than bullets, worse than knives. Worse than careless hands and hushed voices in dark rooms. It hurts because although the Asset will admit that its memory is faulty sometimes, it certainly does not recall its whole existence ever coming undone with every slick sputter, every chunk of flesh removed for inspection, the carefully constructed idea of itself coming apart piece by piece. It hurts because it was born predator, not prey. It hurts because it hurts.

It hurts because it is real.

The body is a slaughterhouse. A morgue. A battlefield, a reckless assemblage of broken pieces strewn haphazardly without shape or form. The body is a human being, somehow still alive, pulsating and oozing, trying to reshape itself into something logical. _Order through pain._

The Asset is not disgusted by the tableau of gore it contains. It is not capable of disgust. Disappointment, however, is an emotion it is intimately familiar with, having been on the receiving end of such sentiment quite often shortly after it was made, long before it learned how to be good. The experience is enough for the Asset to recognise the feeling as it crawls up its exposed oesophagus. The Asset is disappointed.

It bites through its bottom lip in order to silence a cry of pain. To subdue the shame of the imminent realisation. To delay the moment of impeding acknowledgement that it is a person after all. That the mess inside of it represents undeniable evidence of its shortcomings. That the biting and clawing it feels behind the sternum when it cannot sleep is not teeth or knives or winter itself.

It is simply pain.

And the pain is just pain, nothing more than that. It's those ugly, wretched guts twisting and churning like they do inside of lesser beings.

The intimate knowledge of the Asset’s true nature hurts more than a shard of metal piercing the liver. Shame burns somewhere between the stomach and spleen as a tear rolls down the meat of the Asset's cheek.

 

* * *

 

The Asset is a person.

It is skin and guts and blood, so much blood.

It has many names.

The Winter Soldier. _Soldat. Soldatik._

 _Tovarishch_ , after a mission well done, the Asset stuffing its face with vareniki in Babushka Evgeniya's kitchen in the Volgograd safe house, its comrades chatting amicably and sipping black tea from their glasses. A strange warmth settling inbetween the mess of viscera inside its body, too intense to have come from the meal itself.

 _Ghost, revenant, murderer_ , plunging forward despite the bullet wound in its side, knife soon buried to the hilt in the foreign diplomat's neck, the diluted red bubbling on his lips making the Asset still for a second, guts twisted and frozen in painful recollection, before pulling the blade back out, its serrated underside fraying the edge of the wound.

 _Suka._ _Dvornyazhk_ a. _Derzhis', ty ublyudok,_ something poking and prodding around its insides in a way that has nothing to do with the emotional dimension of its newly discovered personhood. Just _plokhaya sobaka_ when it's being bad and _khoroshaya sobaka_ when it's good, pain in the stomach and pain stuck in the throat, threatening to spill through the eyes.

 _Zima!_ _Zima, zima zima_ , _snegovik, snezhnyy velikan,_ _snezhinka._ _Mamochka_ , Natashenka grasping its hand, bathed in the eerie red glow, on her way to receive her very first assignment. Twelve years old, all scrawny legs and red curls, head held high but a tiniest glint of uncertainty in her eyes. _Zima_ tightening its grip on her palm, something strange and glowing shining bright inside its stomach, making its insides feel like they will expand and burst any given moment. Years later it will recognize the feeling as pride.

 _Bucky_ , uttered in such disbelief, its guts twisting and turning, lurching up to its throat, pain somehow stopping for a millisecond. The world gone silent and then crashing down all at once.

**Author's Note:**

> Soldat, soldatik - soldier  
> Tovarishch - comrade  
> Suka - bitch  
> Dvornyazhka - mongrel  
> Derzhis', ty ublyudok – stay down, you bastard  
> Plokhaya sobaka – bad dog  
> Khoroshaya sobaka – good dog  
> Zima – winter  
> Snegovik – snowman  
> Snezhnyy velikan – snow giant  
> Snezhinka - snowflake  
> Mamochka - mommy


End file.
